Dresden: 70 years later, fiery WWII debate still hits home

Seventy years ago, in the final stages of World War II, a German city of Baroque architecture and art was turned into a flaming caldron. The British and American firebombing of Dresden killed an estimated 25,000, almost all of them civilians.

“The Allies slaughter-bombed an entire city,” said Donald L. Miller, a historian whose “Masters of the Air” is the basis of an upcoming HBO series. “Wiped it off the face of the earth, practically.”

While there’s near-universal consensus that the Allies fought a “good war” against an evil foe, Dresden — like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombing of Tokyo — remains controversial.

Scholars may cite the Nazi regime’s savagery, plus Dresden’s role as a railway hub that sped Wehrmacht troops to combat and Jews to death camps; or counter that the killing of unarmed noncombatants is routinely condemned by moral, as well as military, leaders. These academic arguments, while passionate, tend to be impersonal.

Not Maria Ritter. Her views on Dresden could not be more personal.

“I remember pieces of this,” she said, “because it’s so traumatic.”

Today, Ritter is a psychoanalyst whose La Jolla practice — perhaps not coincidentally — helps people recover from trauma. Seventy years ago, she was a 3-year-old whose family had fled their home near the Russian front.

Maria vaguely recalls the crowded train that took them out of a war zone and into a fairy tale city once called “Florence on the Elbe.” Here, they were taken in by her grandmother.

A few days later, their sanctuary was shattered. On the night of Feb. 13-14, 1945, almost 1,100 bombers hit Dresden. Three waves of planes dropped about 3,500 tons of explosives on the city; one observer remarked that the last squadrons found no targets still standing, so their bombs merely turned rubble into dust.

The ruined landscape included corpses, too. Ritter’s grandmother died of a heart attack, her aunt of asphyxiation, both in a hallway where about 20 people huddled during the attacks.

“Only our four kids and my mother and another woman walked out of the hallway,” Ritter said. “My mother led us out of the burning city. I remember the orange flames and I remember the bodies.”

Maria Ritter's Return to Dresden recounts the experiences she and her family went through surviving the Dresden bombing which killed tens of thousands of Germans over two nights in February 1945.

Maria Ritter's Return to Dresden recounts the experiences she and her family went through surviving the Dresden bombing which killed tens of thousands of Germans over two nights in February 1945.

These disjoined, nightmarish memories have haunted Ritter for decades. As family lore or academic history, Dresden is a thorny subject with multiple interpretations and few easy answers.

Air power

The Germans were the first to bomb civilians. The Nazis’ April 1937 attack on an unprotected village during the Spanish Civil War spurred Pablo Picasso to paint an anguished masterpiece, “Guernica.”

“Guernica,” said Karl Zingheim, staff historian at the USS Midway Museum, “was a deliberate attempt to terrorize a civilian population.”

After the outbreak of World War II, the German Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry and other cities. As the war progressed, though, Great Britain’s Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Corps struck with more power. Allied bombers killed more than 1 million civilians in Germany and Japan, Miller has calculated. Even before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo left more than 100,000 dead. July 1943 sorties over Hamburg killed 43,000.

These were controversial missions, noted Tom Reifer, an associate professor of sociology at the University of San Diego.

“There’s the moral question of targeting civilian noncombatants,” he said.

At the height of the war, an Anglican prelate — George Bell, bishop of Chichester — condemned British bombing raids on German cities. After Dresden, even Churchill expressed misgivings.

Not so Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, head of the Royal Air Force. “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier,” he wrote in March 1945.

Lafayette College’s Miller has concluded that Dresden was “over-bombed,” yet insists it was a legitimate target: “This was a fanatically pro-Nazi city — there were only 198 Jews still in the city including the humanist Victor Klemperer, whose life was saved by the bombing. Factories there produced gun sights, bomb fuses, poison gas.”

A monstrous foe may justify ugly tactics, but how effective are raids on civilian centers? Do they encourage the victims to surrender?

Recent history, Reifer argues, demonstrates the opposite. After all, innocent civilians were killed by the jets that were used as bombs on Sept. 11, 2001.

“After 9/11,” Reifer said, “instead of the U.S. invading Iraq, did you see the American people say ‘Let’s hold back and not get involved’?”

For most of World War II, Americans shunned “Bomber” Harris’ approach. While British bombers normally flew at night, U.S. bombers conducted raids by day when they had a better view of targets — although they, too, were clearer targets for the enemy.

As the war continued, though, there was a push to prevent Germany’s railroads from delivering supplies and men to the front.

“Here comes the moral dilemma,” Miller said. “Railroad marshaling yards are in the middle of cities. If you hit a marshaling yard you are going to kill a lot of civilians.”

There’s also the nagging question of timing. History records that Germany would surrender in May 1945 and Japan in August 1945. The aircrews, though, had no advance word of when peace would arrive.

“There is a tendency to look backward, to say, ‘See, the war was almost over,’” said Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University.

“But if you look backward, you see the Battle of the Bulge that almost turned the tide of the war in favor of the Germans, that was just in December (1944). The idea that Germany was completely down and out was really not the case.”

Flawed identity

Ritter is familiar with these arguments, but cannot justify what she and her family endured at Dresden.

“The idea,” she said, “was to kill as many civilians as possible.”

Not even four when the war ended, Maria was surrounded by death. Her father, a Methodist minister who had been drafted, was killed a month before Germany’s surrender. In school, the girl and her classmates were shown graphic photos from death camps. It was her introduction to the Holocaust, and she was shocked.

Still is.

“Your German identity is flawed by that history,” she said. “And then you have great musicians like Beethoven and Schubert, writers like Schiller and Goethe. What the hell happened?”

She paused.

“And it was hell.”

In her 2004 memoir “Return to Dresden,” Ritter writes about her abiding love for her brothers, parents and grandparents. But she also wrestles with shame and guilt for being born under Hitler’s rule.

Those feelings accompanied her to the U.S., where she moved in 1966. American culture taught her more about the dark shadow the Holocaust casts over the Jewish community, including several of her clients.

“They’ve felt that I may understand the depth of their experience,” she said.

Every year, the anniversary of the Dresden raids stirs deep emotions within Ritter. Tears come quickly, but so do thoughts of reconciliation and simple human kindness.

Two years ago, Ritter took a call from someone who works for a church in Los Angeles County. A recent check of the church’s archives had yielded a packet of letters from the 1950s.

The author was Ritter’s mother. The letters were thank you notes.

Between 1946 and 1951, the church had sent care packages of soap, towels, coffee, butter, powdered milk and other essentials to war-ravaged Europe. Among the recipients were a widow and her four children in Germany.